The Local Exchange Trading System in France (Système d’Échange Local (SEL)): Creating a scale to measure motivations for participation in SEL practice and identification of SEL member profiles

While Local Exchange Trading Systems (LETS) are regularly cited in the literature on collaborative consumption, they have paradoxically rarely been studied by researchers in the field of marketing. In France, although LETS, or SELs ( Systèmes d’Échanges Locaux), continue to develop, they suffer from high member turnover. This raises the question of whether the existing SELs are responding to the underlying motivations for participation in SEL practice. What is the nature of SEL member motivations? Are these motivations different from those in collaborative consumption more generally? Is it possible to measure them and thus propose SEL member profiles based on these motivations? A qualitative study of 16 SEL members and a quantitative study of 957 SEL members revealed five types of motivations and five SEL member profiles –‘the intellectual protester’, ‘the novice SEL member’, ‘the affective idealist’, ‘the pragmatic consumer’ and ‘the accomplished SEL member’. The theoretical contributions of this study include notably the importance of the ‘for intellectual enrichment’ motivation and the creation of a reliable and valid scale for measuring motivations for participating in SEL practice. The findings have consequences for SEL management teams, who will be able to use them to reduce high turnover and improve the nature of their exchange offers, the effectiveness of their internal and external communications and the recruitment of new members.

La littérature ou la vie : l’obsession de la littérarité chez Jorge Semprun

En offrant un panorama de l’œuvre encore souvent méconnue de Jorge Semprun, cet article entend en amorcer une lecture affranchie des interprétations habituellement liées à la mémoire des camps. Il s’attache à étudier les stratégies d’écriture de l’auteur-témoin qui semble chercher à imposer à tout prix son œuvre dans le champ littéraire. En analysant la manière dont Semprun écrit le souvenir de la déportation et de l’engagement communiste, un paradoxe central apparaît : tout en se manifestant de manière quasi obsessive comme écriture littéraire, cette dernière ne cesse de mettre en scène le caractère gratuit et purement ludique — en somme inessentiel par rapport au vécu — de la littérature et de ses enjeux. Abstract This article tries to provide both an overview of the yet unknown work of Jorge Semprun and a new reading, freed from the usual interpretations linked to the deportation memory. It analyzes the writing strategies of the author-witness who tries to impose his work in the literary field. By studying the way Semprun writes his own memories of the deportation and of his commitment as a high member of the Communist Party, a central paradox appears: his writing seems obsessed with being literary, and yet it keeps displaying the gratuity of literature, which is thus considered as unessential compared to reality.